Manuel Felisi
Silent Dialogue
Opening: Thursday, 11 June 2026, 6:30 pm
12 June – 17 July 2026
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting
Via L. Settembrini 17, 20124, Milan
Tuesday to Friday, 3:00–7:00 pm
Curated by Glenda Cinquegrana
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to present Silent Dialogue, the first solo exhibition by Manuel Felisi (Milan, 1976) at the gallery. The exhibition brings together a focused selection of works from the artist’s Vertigini cycle, in which Felisi continues to develop his distinctive hybrid practice, combining photographic printing, painting, and supports drawn from industrial materials such as concrete and felt.
For this exhibition, Felisi sets out to establish a silent dialogue with the history of Italian art: from Giulio Paolini and his reversed canvas to Giuseppe Uncini, whose use of concrete Felisi revisits; from Gilberto Zorio and his hides impressed with words and stars, to Joseph Beuys and his use of felt. These materials, which for the artists of Arte Povera were charged with energy, become for Felisi dense with manual labor and with a memory tied to work. Even when removed from their ordinary context, they remain charged with meanings connected to the impact of everyday gestures upon our vital space.
As is often the case in Felisi’s work, these meaning-laden supports are interrupted by the sudden emergence of trees, whose crowns radiate towards the sky and into the picture like nervous systems. The image of the tree appears as a living organism, spreading and growing within the living matter of the work itself.
The tree is also the element through which Felisi articulates an inverted vision of things. For the artist, vertigo is not the gaze that looks down into the abyss; on the contrary, it is the eye that, from below upwards — as though we were lying on a lawn — immerses itself in, and loses itself within, the totality of nature. The viewpoint expressed by Felisi through the image of the painting is not one of detachment from the world, but its opposite: the image arises from an intimate understanding of our place in the cosmos, immersed in and surrounded by the life of